Reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward brings a bit of sorely-needed common sense about food to the arugula-obsessed halls of the Washington Post:
4. People need more information about what they eat.
It’s hard to argue against rules that give consumers more information. Perhaps for that reason, proposals to require restaurants to jam calorie, fat and other nutrition statistics onto already crowded signs and menus pop up over and over — most recently as part of the health-care reform law — despite the fact that virtually all major fast-food chains already provide such information on handouts and online.
Knowing that a chocolate shake at Shake Shack has 740 calories doesn’t stop me — or the first lady— from ordering one occasionally. We’re not alone: Studies consistently find that menu labeling doesn’t result in healthier choices. A recent study from Ghent University in Belgium found that labels made no difference in the consumption patterns of students there, backing up a 2009 New York University study that found no improvement in poor New Yorkers’ eating habits after the introduction of mandatory menu labeling in the Big Apple.
5. There are too many fast-food restaurants in low-income neighborhoods.
In many urban neighborhoods, it’s easier to get permission to open a sex shop than a Taco Bell, thanks to aggressive policies by local zoning boards. But zoning out fast-food restaurants in cities is a lost cause — they are probably already too thick on the ground for new restrictions to alter the culinary mix. The same study that found no effect on diet from increased access to fruits and vegetables also found that proximity to fast-food restaurants had only a small effect, and it was limited to young, low-income men.
In a commentary accompanying the study, Jonathan E. Fielding and Paul A. Simon of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health wrote that “policy efforts to reduce access to [junk food], though politically challenging, will likely have a greater impact on reducing the obesity epidemic than efforts focused solely on increasing access to fresh produce and other healthy options.” “Politically challenging” is code for “virtually impossible.”
And for good reason. Eliminating access to fast food and other junk food means taking away choices, something Americans don’t tend to like, even (or perhaps especially) when it’s for their own good.
And worst of all: imagine there’s no pizza. I couldn’t if I tried:
“Eliminating access to fast food and other junk food…”
How revealing! Fast food = junk food. An overstatement, perhaps? Quite a few fast food chains and their franchisees would take exception to your assertion that what they serve is junk food. I’d be inclined to say that there should be moderation in writing as in eating.
I’m just quoting Katherine Mangu-Ward.
“Fast food = junk food. An overstatement, perhaps?”
Can you name a fast food restaurant that serves food that isn’t junk food? I can’t think of one.
When The Wife and I go to McDonald’s for breakfast we like to get their oatmeal and fruit and yogurt parfaits.
McDonald’s Oatmeal is junk food with a placebo effect of health.
Their chicken nuggets are probably the healthiest thing on the menu, and I wouldn’t say they are junk food. The salads are pretty poor.
But Jimmy Johns? You have a hard time not ordering something healthy from there.
I don’t really care if people want McDonalds’s less healthy stuff. None of my damn business.
You would never eat another chicken nugget if you knew which body part it is.
I think it was Otto von Bismark who first observed that while laws and Chicken McNuggets are both important, you really don’t want to observe either being made.
I may be paraphrasing, however.
LOL.
I’ve always liked to imagine that the ingredient “mechanically separated chicken” was code for roadkill myself.
Wendy’s. It’s sells main course salads. You don’t have to buy the fries, etc.
SaladWorks.com
Um, I only see two myths, not five; numbers 4 and 5. :S
You’ve got to click over to the article to read them all. The Washington Post may love Occupy Wall Street, but curiously, I don’t think they’d appreciate someone stealing all of their property.
Turn on Food Network any time you like and watch the endless cheery celebration of belly-busting burgers, if-you-can-eat-all-this-it’s-free items of every kind, pizzas the circumference and thickness of manhole covers, gut-stuffing pie eating or hot dog eating or whatever eating contests, and on and on and on. Yet these restaurants get no media or political heat because they’re not massively profitable on a national or international scale. The Food Nazis are about punishing successful large-scale capitalist enterprises. They don’t care a bit about healthy eating.
I’m going to Five Guys on my birthday next week to eat a huge double cheeseburger and an order of fries. The Food Nazis will be fretting about whether the Happy Meal available down the street will have more calories and fat with apple slices as opposed to grapes. Unfortunately, they’ll be getting paid to fret by a grant from the USDA or some other public trough. Why else do you think they do this?
Paid to fret. What a great phrase!
it’s the recession 5 myths have been reduced to 2 here. But even on the WAPO site the article has only 3 myths.
Whoops, I linked to the jump page instead of page one. I’ve fixed that in the above post, or you can click here.
I’ve read in a number of places that the strongest correlation exists between frequency of obesity and overall social affluence of the society. Societies in which people enjoy a higher standard of living are more likely to experience an increase in the number of people who’re obese. Most of the theories I’ve seen purporting to connect those two facts have to do with our instinctive pattern of eating to excess when food is plentiful in order to survive through periods of famine. Apparently, we’re still ‘wired’ for the old “boom and bust” way of life our distant ancestors experienced. Through on top of that, the simple fact that affluent societies tend to be less oriented toward manual labour and you’ve got yourself an ‘obesity crisis’.
So if the path to a leaner society with better eating habits is less affluence, I’d have to say that on balance the current crop of nanny-staters and statists is on the right path. Another couple of administrations like the current one and we’ll all be in the poorhouse and living on some nice healthy gruel and hardtack.
I’ve often wondered what possible good could come from that John Lennon song. Thanks for clearing up the mystery!
Well I know of a case where a person started eating McDonald’s fish sandwiches because they needed to gain weight and the sandwiches were listed for very high calories. They lost weight instead. One of those “HUH,” deals.
The older I get the less faith I have in the pronouncements of the food Nazis, especially from those who just parrot the latest from some biased study.
Correlation does not equal causation.
Just for kicks, you may wish to read about culinary vanity and food psychosis at the other end of the price spectrum. Frank Bruni skewers the restaurant Romero in his article: ‘Dinner and Derangement’
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/bruni-dinner-and-derangement.html?_r=3
Every food desert I’ve ever seen identified was in a zone better known for having a high crime rate. Getting robbed frequently drives businesses away. Food deserts are self-imposed by neighborhoods that tolerate the criminals among them. It’s as simple as that.
The foof desert claim got talked up a lot after the LA Riots and there were lots of incentives offered to the major chains to put stores in some of the worst parts of urban Los Angeles. Within a few years they sold the locations off to small local chains and got the hell out because the cost of doing business in those locations was so high.
It isn’t a nutrition issue. It’s a crime issue.
When you read any of the supposed issues the response is always to have the gov’t take over for the abdication of personal responsibility. The ‘food deserts’ myth is just a racebaiting lie. Are there more electronics stores in these ‘food deserts’? Wonder why?
TV and video games are the likely culprits to my, and your, fat- and weak-ness. If they didn’t exist, we wouldn’t be sitting on our ever-expanding asses even more than our sedentary work requires. Media and entertainment is the problem.
If you ever sit outside a McDonald’s restaurant and observe the people going in and out, the majority of them are fat.
I would guess, however, that they would still be fat if the McDonald’s wasn’t there. Their eating habits and/or lack of exercise would remain constants. It’s not like they would suddenly choose to eat an apple and work out at the gym if the evil fast food joint didn’t exist.